>the statistical correlation between groups of sounds
That assumes that the speaker is similar to the person correlating the sounds. For example, if you had statistical data for utterances of English sounds in the context of Magic the Gathering tournaments, and you tried to decipher the speech of a Swahili electrical engineer talking about transistors, you could very well decipher something that's seemingly coherent but entirely incorrect.
It would be an overgeneralization to assume that whales speak about things in the same statistical patterns that humans do.
That assumes that the speaker is similar to the person correlating the sounds. For example, if you had statistical data for utterances of English sounds in the context of Magic the Gathering tournaments, and you tried to decipher the speech of a Swahili electrical engineer talking about transistors, you could very well decipher something that's seemingly coherent but entirely incorrect.
It would be an overgeneralization to assume that whales speak about things in the same statistical patterns that humans do.